[HN Gopher] How James Clear is writing his next book (2021)
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How James Clear is writing his next book (2021)
Author : nyc111
Score : 51 points
Date : 2022-09-18 12:54 UTC (10 hours ago)
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| rcarr wrote:
| One of his articles helped me in a debate about a codebase once.
| There were two camps at the company. One camp believed that we
| should be looking to optimise the code we wrote by choosing
| faster options such as for loops over slower chain functions such
| as forEach (application was written in Typescript, I don't know
| if this is the case for all languages). The other camp classified
| these kinds of changes as micro optimisations. I belonged to the
| former. The code base was huge and the application was slow
| bordering on unusable.
|
| I used the Dave Brailsford British Cycling analogy from Atomic
| Habits that the aggregation of marginal gains can result in big
| changes on the macro level. Or put in other words, one non-
| optimised function might not make much of a difference but lots
| of them in a massive code base with millions of lines most
| certainly does. My co-worker's response was that he was not sure
| that the analogy from cycling transferred over to coding but I
| could tell that it was at least giving him pause for thought.
|
| In reality, there were many reasons for how slow that codebase
| was. There were most certainly bigger fish, but I still believe
| that choosing more optimal language options where possible would
| have helped.
| galfarragem wrote:
| I'm using Github to write mine.. It's acessible from all devices
| and has markdown rendering out of the box.
| bee_rider wrote:
| Working on an academic paper in LaTeX at the moment. I've got
| this feeling in the back of my head that just trying to produce
| a work fully from my own head seems inefficient. Why not just
| throw it up on github, then post it here? In the very least all
| my little grammatical errors would be quickly highlighted.
| prionassembly wrote:
| I wrote a Python script (it's so shoddy and easy to recreate I
| won't even share) that will (1) look for definitions as
| words/expressions between asterisks (2) look for dependencies
| (words that should be defined beforehand) and (3) produce
| paragraph-paragraph graph -> minimum spanning tree -> toposort.
|
| The plan is to take five-ish years of blog material that's nearly
| unreadable to people who haven't followed it from the beginning
| and produce ordered text.
| kleiba wrote:
| There must be a better tool for professional writers than Google
| Docs?!
| greymalik wrote:
| I'm not a professional, but I find Scrivener [1] invaluable.
| Having 600 pages of unstructured, unorganized text would be a
| nightmare for me.
|
| [1] https://www.literatureandlatte.com/scrivener/overview
| thenerdhead wrote:
| I used Scrivener to write my two books:
|
| https://jondouglas.dev/enough & https://jondouglas.dev/ptp
|
| Scrivener is not so great for collaborating though. Nobody on
| Reedsy seemed to know about the tool from the editor
| perspective and all asked for Word/Google Docs/Pdf.
| andrei_says_ wrote:
| Just finished publishing a 600+ page book for a writer.
|
| The collaboration features of Google Docs streamline work with
| a proofreader and editor better than anything else I've seen.
|
| Author writes, editor / proofreader suggest changes, author
| approves.
|
| All updates tracked and fairly easy to revert.
|
| After editing, docs are exported to rtf and placed in indesign.
|
| Google docs are intuitive and easier to use than ms word. No
| more sending files back and forth.
|
| Haven't seen a better process yet. Some editors still request a
| printed manuscript for them to put hand-written notes on ;)
| kleiba wrote:
| That makes sense, however, that's already the final stages of
| the product. I have my doubts that Google Docs is the best
| choice for the creation of the first draft, though. Once you
| have that, everything that comes after that is surely in good
| hands with a traditional word processor, and as you point
| out, the strength of Google Docs over Word etc. lies in its
| collaborative abilities.
| sn41 wrote:
| I am not a professional writer, but among the paid tools I have
| used in the past, I find Scrivener to be pretty nice in helping
| me organize views. I however find its LaTeX support not very
| satisfactory, but probably that is not their main target
| market.
| bluenose69 wrote:
| For me, it's vim editing latex files, with git for version
| control. Others might choose emacs as an editor, but the other
| decisions are pretty common in my field (physical science).
| kleiba wrote:
| You haven't switched to Overleaf for collaborative editing
| yet?
| cinntaile wrote:
| Overleaf is not really suited for non-technical people,
| it's not even suited for technical people that are
| unfamiliar with latex. They could make it much better if
| you could annotate on the pdf instead for non-technical
| people and that these annotations (and or changes) get
| translated to the latex files so the author sees them in
| the right place as well.
| kleiba wrote:
| Grandparent is a scientist who's familiar with latex.
| cinntaile wrote:
| Oh! Then he should give Overleaf a try. Be sure to split
| up the files so you're not working in the same document
| at the exact same time, this is sometimes problematic
| when pressing compile.
| blackbrokkoli wrote:
| I don't think the final edition is going to be made by going to
| Export To PDF in Google Docs. He seems to be mostly using it as
| a paste dump, then refining it into chapters, dumping it down,
| formatting slowly. For that, Google Docs really seems as good
| as any, no?
| kleiba wrote:
| I don't know. Google Docs is a linear tool for linear text,
| mostly. But the process you describe is anything but linear -
| it resembles a slow conversion from an unstructured mess to a
| final text. Intuitively, there seems to be a mismatch between
| that process and a classic word processor.
| vinner_roy wrote:
| Working on this over at pagespace.app, looking for cofounders
| if anyone is interested! Notion-like writing experience is the
| goal with the ability to sell via subscription or per unit.
| Lwepz wrote:
| >When you have a big concept in the back of your mind, it becomes
| a filter that everything you experience runs through
|
| This is so true, to the point where sometimes you feel possessed
| by the concept and not the other way around. The concept harvests
| your human experience to make its way into the real world. It
| defines your notion of signal and noise, it restlessly samples
| patterns in the real world that might help its incarnation.
| Sometimes due to predisposition, part of the concept is hardware
| implemented which means you never really get to experience what
| it's like to live without this concept driving your life.
|
| The concept carefully arranges your dreams, strikes you with
| overwhelming visions that feel more real that your clearest
| memories and skilfully crafts your personality.
|
| For those who feel as though they are concept integrators, do not
| allow concepts to mistreat you. They don't belong to our world,
| they don't care about the totality of human experience, they
| operate on timescales far greater than that of our precious lives
| and our civilisation as a whole is still far too primitive to
| bear their throughput.
| thenerdhead wrote:
| It's crazy to think it has already been 4 years since he released
| this book. I read it when it first came out and thought it was
| life-changing. Then I started to read other habit books and
| realized the ideas are the same, just his writing was more
| practical than academics.
|
| I then started to read old self-help from the 1800s/1900s and
| realized the format was pretty similar(think Orson Swett Marden)
| of chapters related around real-life stories of success to drive
| the points home.
|
| I'm excited to see what he comes up with next. He's a great
| writer. I hope the dilemma of being a #1 NYT best seller doesn't
| prevent him from continuing to author books regardless of how
| good they are. In other words, I hope he breaks out of the
| "habits guy" persona as he has much more great material to write
| books about.
| WA wrote:
| > chapters related around real-life stories of success to drive
| the points home
|
| I'm so torn on this. Because this is the fluff of (American)
| business books. The endless stories, all suffering from
| survivorship bias, unnecessarily inflating the book. But
| sometimes, a good story helps.
|
| One of my favorite books about running a small software company
| is "Rework" from the 37signals guys. I also read "Getting
| Real", which came before, is kinda the same book plus stories.
|
| I enjoyed Rework without the stories a lot more.
| tessierashpool wrote:
| James Clear is an incredible marketer. I blogged about the same
| stuff ten years ago and read books covering all the same
| material at the time as well. The only stuff I actually learned
| from James Clear was a few mnemonics, i.e., there were a few
| times he rephrased existing knowledge in a way that was easier
| to remember.
|
| Mostly, though, he is just fantastic at marketing. He's a good
| writer, but that's not the thing to learn from him, in my
| opinion. He has email lists, a podcast strategy -- I forgot the
| rest but he gets deep into it.
| humanlion87 wrote:
| +10 to this. I would actually recommend Tiny Habits by BJ
| Fogg (whose research is referenced to in Atomic Habits) as a
| more complete book with regards to this topic.
| insightcheck wrote:
| Seconded. The approach is very readable and also happens to
| be from an academic perspective, as BJ Fogg is a Stanford
| professor of psychology. I also liked the list of suggested
| potentially useful habits at the back of the book.
| cinntaile wrote:
| I was subscribed to his newsletter for a while but his style
| just didn't click for me, it felt kind of trite.
| insightcheck wrote:
| [EDIT: This comment is wrong, and can't be deleted; I
| misremembered James Clear as Scott Young, apologies.] On
| the one hand, most of Clear's writing is uncontroversial
| and easy-to-read (which is why Atomic Habits took off
| versus other habit books, as another commenter wrote).
| However, I think a lot of his success comes from his past
| moments of some controversy. The MIT challenge/the language
| learning challenges were a bit controversial due to sowing
| doubt, but earned [Scott Young] a lot of clout.
| thenerdhead wrote:
| Are you talking about someone else like Scott Young?
| insightcheck wrote:
| Yes, thanks for the catch. I made a mistake, and will
| edit the comment to correct.
| [deleted]
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